Reading, listening to, and questioning America... from the southern Great Plains

Guilty parties

The administration is proposing a "solution" at Guantanamo which will punish some alleged 9/11 murderers without full justice even as it lets other perpetrators of heinous crimes -- Bush administration interrogators -- go untouched. According to the New York Times in what appears to have been a Friday evening news dump:

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

The proposal isn't being carried out by executive order: Congress must approve. Still, the mere proposal suggests an unwillingness to abide by the law and respect the need of most Americans for transparency. We, like the rest of the world, want the assurance that justice is being done.

Does this remind anyone else of scuttling the physical evidence of the 9/11 attacks? Remember: most of the steel wreckage was cut and melted down within three months of the attacks and shipped to a steel plant in China. It looks as though any examination of these prisoners' handling as detainees is being scuttled off in much the same way.